You’ve heard repeatedly that the U.S. is in the middle of an opioid epidemic, and addiction experts have been pushing for a decrease in the number of opioid prescriptions in an attempt to combat it. Now, it seems, they’ve gotten it. According to a new analysis released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the overall amount of opioid painkillers prescribed in the U.S. fell 18 percent between 2010 and 2015. And high-dose prescriptions dropped 41 percent.

The findings prompted headlines boasting good news, as it's clearly a reaction to the opioid crisis. But experts say it's more complicated than that. For starters, the data also show that in 2015, doctors were still prescribing opioids at three times the rate they did in 1999. And they're being prescribed for longer periods of time. Meanwhile, deaths from opioid overdose continue to climb.

First, let's talk about the rise in the average length of prescriptions, which increased from 13 days in 2006 to 18 days in 2015.

It turns out that previously mentioned decrease in overall opioids largely happened among prescriptions for less than 30 days. Since 2012, fewer shorter-term prescriptions were written while longer-term prescriptions stayed about the same.

On the one hand, longer average prescription lengths could indicate that short-term prescriptions are going down as doctors cut back on writing opioid prescriptions when ibuprofen or another pain reliever might work instead. “The basic idea is that if you remove from the pool a great many of these short-term acute pain patients, what remains is the legitimately treated long-term chronic pain patients, and they are going to have long-length prescriptions filled, month in and month out,” James C. Anthony, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Michigan State University who researches neuropsychiatric and drug-dependence epidemiology, tells SELF. This would then create a longer average length of prescription because so many questionable short-term acute pain patients have been taken out of the mix.

The author of the new CDC report agrees. “This change might reflect that fewer people are starting on opioids in the first place while people already receiving opioids long-term tend to continue opioids," Deborah Dowell, M.D., M.P.H., senior medical advisor for the Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention at the CDC, tell SELF.

On the other hand, there's concern over increasing prescription lengths and addictive potential, as Indra Cidambi, M.D., an addiction medicine expert and medical director at Center for Network Therapy, tells SELF. “Time is a factor in becoming chemically dependent on an addictive medication—the longer an individual is on opioid medications, the higher the chances of becoming chemically dependent on the drug, resulting in development of tolerance and withdrawal symptoms,” she says.

But there’s another issue here: The fact that most people who end up addicted to opioids weren’t prescribed them in the first place.

According to a data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, more than 50 percent of people who are addicted to pain pills got them from someone close to them with a prescription—like a friend or family member.

While it's certainly possible for someone who was prescribed opioids for a legitimate medical reason to become addicted, it's also likely that the same prescription medications—in the wrong hands—can get someone else hooked.

And then there’s the fact that the vast majority of opioid-related deaths are attributed to illegal street drugs, not pills.

When we talk about deaths related to opioid overdose, that includes deaths from all opioids—a dangerous and highly addictive class of drugs that includes prescription painkillers like Vicodin, OxyContin, and Percocet, as well as street drugs like heroin and fentanyl. Data released by the CDC in 2016 revealed that deaths related to opioid overdose in the U.S. nearly tripled between 1999 and 2014. In 2014, there were 47,055 drug overdose deaths, and 28,647 of them involved opioids. Then, from 2014 to 2015, death rates increased by nearly 16 percent, and 72 percent of those were from heroin and synthetic opioids—not prescriptions.

That said, we know there's a link between prescription opioid use and illegal drug use. "There is reason to believe that a prescription opioid-dependent user seeks out another source when one doctor stops being a regular supplier, or a 'pill mill' is shut down," Dr. Anthony says. That can lead an addict to look for other doctors who will prescribe opioids and, if they can't find it, they might turn to street drugs like heroin, fentanyl, or carfentanil, he says.

In the end, fewer pills in communities is likely a positive thing all around. But it’s not going to be the silver bullet that ends the opioid crisis as some may be painting it.

In one sense, cutting back on opioid prescriptions could reduce both the amount of people who become hooked on opioids and the amount of pills in a community. But it will take more than that to see a similar decrease in opioid-related deaths, especially if people with addictions aren't the ones being prescribed in the first place—and if they end up turning to street drugs when their supply runs out.

"This is part of the reason we need public health outreach for medication-assisted treatment," Dr. Anthony says. "So that the alternative host response is in the direction of a public health program, and not in the direction of increased demand for 'street-supplied' products of an unethical vendor with no controls on the quality of what otherwise is an uncertain product of unknown origin and content," he says.

Jamison Monroe Jr., founder and CEO of Newport Academy, tells SELF that there is still more work to be done. “We need significant investment in education—public and professional—around not only the dangers of opioids but alternatives to opioids, and an increase in investment in treatment for those that do become addicted,” he says.

He points to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse which found that every dollar invested in drug addiction treatment and prevention yields between $4 and $7 for society in savings from drug-related crime, criminal justice costs, and theft as a sign that allocating government funds toward fighting the crisis could benefit everyone.

“Progress to me would be seeing the deaths start to decrease,” Sarah Wakeman, M.D., medical director for substance use disorders at the Massachusetts Center for Community Health, tells SELF. “Increasingly the data is showing us that simply focusing on prescribing does not result in a decrease in opioid-related deaths.”